The Cure: Faith

The Cure: Faith

1981

Fiction Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl & Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. The Holy Hour  2. Primary  3. Other Voices  4. All Cats Are Grey  5. The Funeral Party  6. Doubt  7. The Drowning Man  8. Faith




Whenever I look at this album cover, I see a big grey thumb...

In reality, I have no idea what's being depicted on the album cover...I'll look it up real quick...

♪ "Hmmm, hmmmm...Dumpty Dummm..." ♪

 Apparently, it's a photo of Bolton Abbey, which is a church owned by soft-rock mogul Michael Bolton...I think it's supposed to be one of those cool churches where they let you play electric guitar...♪ Deedle dee dee ♪...

Anyway, "Faith" is the third album by the Cure...It's possibly even greyer than "Seventeen Seconds," but most of the post-punk spikiness is gone, replaced by a funereal sense of calm...

 Again, all the songs blend together to form a singular bleak mood-piece, with very little standing out, outside of the rocking "Primary" (which sports a catchy chant chorus) and "The Funeral Party,"which you can tell by the title, is a barrel of laughs:

"Two pale figures
Ache in silence
Timeless
In the quiet ground
Side by side
In age and sadness..."

"About the death of my grandparents, and ultimately, I suppose, of the death of my parents, and then me... "

-Robert Smith

I like this song, even though it creeps me out...It kind of sparkles in its bleakness, if that makes sense...Oh, I actually noticed a factual error on this album..Robert Smith claims "All Cats Are Grey," and while it's true that my cat Yoda, is in fact Grey...

 My cat, Corde is irrefutably brown-ish and tiger-striped...

...and my cat Iggy is orange and white...

So, hopefully on the next reissue, Robert Smith and company will be mindful to update the song title to "All Cats Are Grey (except Corde, who is tiger-striped and Iggy, who is orange and white)...

I've always been a bit torn about the album closing title-track, "Faith." I can't tell if Robert's turning his back on society once and for all to go die somewhere or if it finally offers a faint glimmer of hope...Personally, I get the "Fuck your world, I'm going to start my own" vibe...

"No one lifts their hands
No one lifts their eyes
Justified with empty words
The party just gets better and better

I went away alone
With nothing left
But faith..."

Maybe, it's the word "Faith." Come to think of it, it's odd to call such a hopeless album, "Faith"...It could be irony, I don't know... If not, the title casts a whole new light on the album, suddenly...Come to think of it, even the narrator of "the Funeral Party" appears to have a type of naive faith...Watching the ghosts dancing, when in reality, there's really just a couple of cold bodies lying in the ground...Maybe carrying on in a world devoid of hope, is an act of faith...To be ridiculously blunt about it, life really is a long, lonely walk to the grave...So why do we bother anyway? Because, my party's gonna be different....The despairing girl who drowns at the end of "The Drowning Man" doesn't make it out alive, but Robert does in the album's closing lines...
 
Maybe "Faith" is a feel-good album when viewed from the edge of the abyss...I must certainly get something from it...I listen to it often and have bought it on vinyl and compact disc at this point...And I bet when the holo-crystal comes out, I'll buy that too...

 So here's "Primary" by the Cure...